aqua fortis

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Yesterday we rented a car in Bath in order to drive around to various more remote locations: Stonehenge, Avebury, etc., ending in Salisbury, where we planned to drop off the car and then take a train back to London.

We successfully (more or less) navigated insanely narrow country village streets and an unholy number of roundabouts in this Nissan SUV which we were surprised to get considering I thought we were getting a compact car. We didn't get lost, thanks to Google Maps. We managed to visit most of the sites we wanted to see (with a few exceptions due to time constraints) and congratulated ourselves on getting to the car rental office in Salisbury 15 minutes before our scheduled dropoff time.

Of all the various things that could go awry with this plan, we never guessed it would be the part where we DROP OFF THE CAR.

But then, it all started just a little off. The night before picking up the car, we noticed that the reservation paperwork we'd printed said that we were picking it up at 5 pm in Bath and dropping it off at 6 pm in Salisbury. (It's entirely due to their crap website which likes to reset the time of your reservation any time you make any minor change while trying to set it up.) This was NOT what we had intended for our all-day trip, but I managed to change it online to an 8:30 am pickup. Okay. Not too bad. They had a car for us when we showed up the next morning, though it wasn't the one we expected. Fine.

BUT THEN!!! Upon arriving at the Salisbury rental office at 5:45, we found the facility gates locked with a giant padlock, the whole place apparently shut (despite their posted closing time of 6:00), and no key dropbox anywhere. We searched in vain for a way in, to no avail. We spent about 10 minutes wandering around in utter confusion, going WHAT IS HAPPENING THIS IS CRAZY AARRGGGHHH.

Then came the phone calls. I called their office number and nobody answered. I called the office where we rented the car in Bath and nobody answered. I called the Customer Service main number and got a recording that said their customer service line closed at 5:30.

We all know how much I love making phone calls, so of course I made yet another call in a last-ditch attempt to speak to a human, and called the next closest car rental office, 20 miles away at the Southampton airport. The very nice lovely woman I spoke to was calm with my flustered self, waited on the phone while we searched one more time for a dropbox or a way in, and finally suggested that we leave the car parked in front and HIDE THE KEYS SOMEWHERE. Oh god. There seemed to be nowhere good to hide the keys that we could actually reach from OUTSIDE.

Here's the really fun part: Rob finally decided to jump the fence. There was a high iron fence all the way around the place except on one short side where the car rental facility abutted the neighboring auto shop business. (BTW we did ask them what the heck was up with the Hertz people and they were like, uh, we don't know them.) On that side was a rickety wooden fence about 6 feet high. Braving CCTV cameras and who knew what other possible alarms and things, Rob climbed over, hid the keys underneath their rental office portable structure, and climbed back to our side. The kind Southampton office lady agreed to send them an email on our behalf so there was external evidence we attempted to make the dropoff. Rob took pictures to document where we left the car and keys, and later on, when we'd actually made it back to our lodgings in London at around 10:30 pm, I followed up by filling in the web contact form (since Hertz apparently doesn't have a direct way to email anyone), explaining what happened, and sending them a picture showing where we left the keys.

As positive as our experiences with Hertz have been the last few times we used them, including in Australia, this time was TOTALLY INSANE.

Thursday, January 05, 2017

We've been talking about writing goals in our WritingYA critique group this month, and I've been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks. One of the ideas I keep coming back to is reconnecting with what brings me joy in writing.

It's a tough question, and one I find particularly difficult to consider during times when ongoing anxiety and depression issues rear their ugly Cerberus-like heads and distract me from seeing an answer. In part, I think I keep obsessing over this particular question BECAUSE it has been so hard to answer. The easy, pat response is, of course, that the writing itself, the act of crafting words and bringing stories to life is a joy in itself. That's what everyone wants to hear, right?

There's more to it. It isn't solely about the joy of putting words to page. That particular joy is something I've felt ever since I was a child, but here's an admission: it was not sufficient to tip me over the edge into wanting to make writing my life's work.

If you know me IRL or have been reading my blog and other social media for a while, you'll know that I was focused on a visual art career from about middle school onward. If anything has ever been a calling for me, that felt like it. I liked writing, but art owned my soul.

It turns out that maybe woo-woo soul searching questions—am I still an artist? Is writing my new calling? Can they both be my calling?—are sly distractions from the question of what brings me joy in writing. And once I've been distracted by those questions, I end up sliding down a rabbit hole of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.

But, as I started really focusing on the idea of what brings me joy in writing, it was much more concrete and real-world than I expected. I looked back on what caused me to make that initial decision to try writing freelance articles on the side for my then-employer, which is what led me to take that first writing class through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. What was it that made me so happy, so elated, so motivated to write those arguably quite ridiculous pieces of writing?

Besides the fact that I got to visit weird websites and make jokes about them, got to humorously explicate pithy quotations, and got paid a teeny bonus for doing so, this was my first experience of the sense of connection that writing for a public audience can create. Not just a SENSE of connection: an actual connection, because people would email me with suggestions; they'd send me comments. I was basically blogging before there were blogging platforms, because this was 1999-ish. I was lucky to have an insta-audience (albeit a small one) because I took over someone else's columns on an already-established site, and it was an incredible feeling to get those responses to what I wrote—sometimes from the very websites I was writing about. (And I learned a lot about the fine line between jokes and gratuitous hurtfulness, because I was a very sarcastic twentysomething.)

This is interesting, because I have mixed feelings about the IDEA of connection—my social anxiety and introversion comes into play more and more the harder I think about it. I start thinking about all the blogging and writing I've done that does NOT make me feel like I've managed to connect. And the stakes feel higher, too, because I've accepted the decision to make writing a major part of my career, not just something I'm doing on the side.

So then I get lost in the thought-hole of "I'm doing this for my job, so I can't afford to think about FUN anymore." The very idea of joy seems irrelevant. This is the mire I get caught in, over and over.
Where that train of thought has gone off the rails, I believe, is that I've created a false dichotomy between work ENJOYMENT and work EFFECTIVENESS. The truth is that I'm NOT as effective a writer when I am not in touch with my reasons for doing it. When I'm distracted by extraneous worries that fool me into thinking they are the real problem.

And so that brings me back to what my intrinsic rewards are, and besides satisfaction in a piece I enjoyed writing and worked hard on, and laughing at my own jokes, I keep coming back to writing as an act of connection. Some corollary truths here: When I am more fully engaged in a piece, I think it is ultimately more effective in making me feel connected. I am engaged in this because I feel like I am talking to YOU, right now. The writing itself makes me feel connected, if I engage in it fully.

That feeling has little to do with any comments or responses the writing might generate later, but I wonder: is there a sense of disengagement in some of the posts I write that actually somehow discourages connection and leads to fewer comments? By disengagement, I don't mean a lack of honesty or an unwillingness to spill my guts (though I am definitely guilty of the latter; I'm not a person who is forward with my opinions)—rather, I wonder if I'm inadvertently creating a feeling of distance. In my magazine writing course, in graduate school, I was repeatedly pegged as sounding too academic, and I wonder if that plays into it.

So I have been thinking of ways to connect, to engage. Different ways to approach my writing on a more day-to-day level.

I write. I create. I put some of that here. Read at your own risk. If there were an ampersand code for a little skull-and-crossbones, I'd totally be using it right now.

The term "aqua fortis" was the alchemical nomenclature for nitric acid, a necessary component in etching onto zinc plates for intaglio printmaking. I now use copper plates and ferric chloride almost exclusively, as they are much less toxic, but I still like the sound of "aqua fortis."